Walter POHL – Andre GINGRICH (Eds.)
medieval worlds • no. 6 • 2017
Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, C. 300-1300 CE
R.I. Moore
S. 7 - 19
doi:
10.1553/medievalworlds_no6_2017s7
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Abstract:
The exemption of people and institutions recognised as religious from public obligations, including taxation and military and labour services, appears to have been universal in the complex societies of Eurasia at least from the end of antiquity until the end of the ancien régime – that is, in some cases, until the present. However, the systematisation between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE of the nature and uses of such exemption was everywhere central to the great transformation of that epoch, essential to the emergence or construction of the ancien régime in Europe as in South India, China and Japan. Religious exemption was sometimes promoted and sometimes attacked by rulers, but it is best understood neither as supporting nor as undermining ›the state‹, but as providing a long-term balancing mechanism between centralising powers and local elites; the waqf may be seen as performing a similar function in Islamic societies.
Eurasia; exemption; immunity; taxation; jurisdiction; monasteries; temples; waqf; kings; emperors; nobles; holy man; antiquity; ancien régime; transformation; modernisation; feudalism
Published Online:
2017/12/01 11:37:54
Object Identifier:
0xc1aa5572 0x00372f17
Rights:All rights reserved.For questions regarding copyright and copies please contact us by email.
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Table of Contents
Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, c. 300 – 1300 CE: Introduction
Charles West
Treasures in Heaven: Defining the Eurasian Old Regime?
R. I. Moore
Envisioning a No-Man’s Land: Hermitage as a Site of Exemption in Ancient and Early Medieval
Indian Literature
Kanad Sinha
Evolving Relationship between the Buddhist Monastic Order and the Imperial States of Medieval
China
Mario Poceski
The Normative Character of Monastic Exemption in the Early Medieval Latin West
Kriston R. Rennie
Clerical Exemption in Canon Law from Gratian to the Decretals
Anne J. Duggan
Nothing to Declare: Status, Power and Religious Aspiration in the Policies of Taxation in Ancient
India
Ulrich Pagel
Exemption Not Granted: The Confrontation between Buddhism and the Chinese State in Late
Antiquity and the ‘First Great Divergence’ Between China and Western Eurasia
Antonello Palumbo
The Political Significance of Gifts of Power in the Khmer and Mercian Kingdoms 793-926
Dominic Goodall and Andrew Wareham
Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation: Social Benefits and Conversion to Islam in Late Antiquity
and the Middle Ages
Uriel Simonsohn
Religious Exemption, Justice, and Territories around the Year 1000: The Forgeries of Worms
Thomas Kohl
The Exemption that Proves the Rule: Autonomy and Authority between Alcuin, Theodulf and
Charlemagne (802)
Rutger Kramer
From Symbiosis to Separate Spheres? England, 1163
Judith A. Green
Religious Exemption and Global History before 1300 – Closing Comments
Julia McClure
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